Conference Agenda

Organizer(s): Giulia Accornero (Yale University) and Marcel Camprubi (Princeton University)

Medieval Iberia occupies a liminal space in the Western conception of the Middle Ages. Although geographically European, culturally it is situated amid Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Middle Ages, too, are liminal; as Emma Dillon (2012) framed it, the period has worked as the “border of the Western musical tradition: the edge that marks the beginning of music history.” From a traditional perspective, those origins implicitly coincide with the ninth-century appearance of the earliest forms of musical notation in European, Christian milieus. But what if we were to center the Western Middle Ages on the Iberian peninsula? The papers presented in this panel aim to complicate this canonical history by focusing on a rich Iberian theoretical tradition that expressed itself in Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew.

Paper 1 identifies the previously unknown theorist “al-ʿAbdarī the Valencian,” author of a compendium of Fārābī’s Great Book of Music, and proposes a new paradigm for the study of Arabic music theory that considers the Muslim West, al-Andalus and the Maghreb, as a distinctive music-theoretical space. Paper 2 explores how al-Fārābī’s Enumeration of the Sciences shaped the epistemological framework through which twelfth- and thirteenth-century Jewish scholars active in Iberia and Provence (Yosef ibn ‘Aqnīn, Shem Tov ben Falaquera, Qalonymos ben Qalonymos) understood Arabic music theory. Paper 3 centers on Solomon ibn Yaʿīsh’s (Seville, d. 1345) text on the musical pulse—a rare testimony to the circulation of Islamicate music theory in a Christian-ruled city—in order to demonstrate how musical motion constituted a shared music-theoretical paradigm between Christian, Islamic, and Jewish milieus.

Iberia offers an unparalleled opportunity to rethink the medieval West. These papers demonstrate that an earlier theoretical corpus from the Muslim East—particularly al-Fārābī (d. 950) and Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037)—flourished in Iberian lands across confessional lines under both Muslim and Christian rule. Moving beyond the ill-fated paradigm of the Arabic influence on Western music (Farmer, 1930; Burstyn, 1989), the contributions in this panel approach music-theoretical materials on their own terms, complementing recent studies on Andalusian music focused on cultural and social aspects (Reynolds, 2021).

Within an Arabic manuscript miscellany preserved at Leiden University Library (ms. Or. 23.675) is a treatise titled Questions on the Fundamentals of Music, attributed to a certain “al-ʿAbdarī the Valencian.” Amnon Shiloah first listed al-ʿAbdarī’s work in his RISM catalog of Arabic music sources in 2003, but was not able to identify this otherwise unknown theorist from al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled lands of medieval Iberia. Through a close examination of the works and marginal annotations in the Leiden manuscript, I demonstrate that “al-ʿAbdarī the Valencian” was the famed mathematician Ibn Munʿim al-ʿAbdarī (d. 1228) who, born in the Valencian town of Dènia, spent most of his career in Marrakesh, Morocco. Al-ʿAbdarī’ was not alone in forging a career that spanned the strait of Gibraltar—a geography I argue to have been central to music-theoretical activity in the Muslim West. Music theorists like Umayya ibn Abī al-Ṣalt (1068–1134) and Ibn Bājja (d. 1139) also benefited from the strengthening of political and cultural ties between al-Andalus and the Maghreb after the eleventh century, particularly during the Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Historians of science have noticed in this period a progressive shift of Andalusian intellectual activity away from Eastern centers such as Damascus and Baghdad, and toward the Maghreb, northwest Africa.

Al-ʿAbdarī’s Questions is itself an abridgment of al-Fārābī’s vast and fittingly named Great Book of Music, written in Baghdad in the 930s and arguably the most important medieval Arabic music treatise. Significantly, Umayya ibn Abī al-Ṣalt and Abū ʿAlī ibn Ḥassān al-Quḍāʿī, two other theorists that worked across al-Andalus and the Maghreb, also wrote abridgments of al-Fārābī’s Great Book. Al-Fārābī’s influence can likewise be traced in Jewish writings and in the marginal annotations of an extant Andalusian copy of his treatise (Madrid, BNE, ms. Res/241). Examining al-ʿAbdarī’s compendium alongside these other materials, I demonstrate in concrete terms how sustained engagement with al-Fārābī’s Great Book shaped a distinctive music-theoretical tradition in the Muslim West from the eleventh century onward. Ultimately, I propose a new paradigm for the study of Arabic music theory that considers al-Andalus and the Maghreb as a cohesive music-theoretical space.

This paper considers the influence of al-Fārābī on the music epistemology of Jewish scholars active in Iberia and Provence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Alongside Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), al-Fārābī (870–950) was the most represented music theorist in medieval Hebrew texts on music copied in medieval Iberia and beyond. His works provided an important part of the conceptual and epistemological equipment of Jewish scholars, especially for music.

I understand the epistemology of music as the explanation of 1. the different forces and currents that lead to the integration and justification of the presence of music in the field of knowledge; 2. its organization as a disciplinary field; 3. its links with other disciplines. The Jewish Iberian-Provençal epistemology of music can be analyzed on the basis of the scientific texts produced by Jewish scholars who built their production upon previous theoretical texts, mostly Arabic, that were available to them.

In order to show the influence of al-Fārābī on the Iberian-Provençal Jewish epistemology of music , in this paper I compare different translations of the music section from the Farabian Enumeration of the Sciences (Iḥsā al-‘ulūm) by Yosef ibn ‘Aqnīn (c. 1150– c. 1220), Shem Tov ben Falaquera (c. 1225–c. 1295) and Qalonymos ben Qalonymos (1286–after 1328). Despite its brevity, their treatment of this passage is illuminating. Each of these scholars adapts it to his or her understanding and introduces variations in the epistemic status of music.

I extend this comparative work by analyzing an important music treatise attributed to Abū al-Ṣalt (1068–1134), an originally Arabic text that only survives in Hebrew translation. This abridgment of al-Fārābī's Great Book on Music is very likely of Andalusian origin, and it certainly circulated in Spain. I show that the structure of Abū al-Ṣalt’s text differs from that of the Great Book and that it was the Enumeration of the Sciences which influenced the organization of its contents.

Beyond the influence of this great theorist, this paper demonstrates how al-Fārābī in Hebrew contributed to the development of a musical culture in some Iberian-Provençal Jewish scholarly circles.

Jewish physician and polymath Solomon ben Abraham Ibn Yaʿīsh (Seville, d. 1345) is the author of the Judeo-Arabic commentary to the first volume of Ibn Sīnā's The Canon of Medicine (1025), preserved today in two manuscript copies (Langermann 1990/91).This unedited and overlooked commentary contains a lengthy passage on the musical nature of the human pulse. In this paper, I show two ways in which this text disrupts Christian- and Latin-centric narratives of medieval music theory.

First, Ibn Yaʿīsh’s commentary constitutes a unique witness to the circulation of Islamicate music theory in a Christian-ruled city in medieval Iberia. In expanding on the music-theoretical conceptualization of arterial pulsation, Ibn Yaʿīsh explicitly draws on earlier Islamicate sources: al-Fārābī’s Great Book of Music (c. 900) and the section on the melody in Ibn Sīnā’s The Book of Healing (1027). I situate Ibn Yaʿīsh within the longer tradition of Islamicate music theory in medieval Iberia, cultivated by both Muslim and Jewish scholars, and reveal how, even after the Christian conquest of Seville in 1248, these texts were read, preserved, and re-elaborated in Arabic as it was the privileged language within Jewish medical circles.

Second, Ibn Yaʿīsh’s commentary illuminates the concept of musical pulse, a trope that also (re)emerged in Latin and vernacular texts from the thirteenth century onwards (Siraisi 1975, 2001; Holford-Strevens 1993; Pesic 2022). Through a close reading of his commentary, I show how the analogy between musical sound and the pulse is only possible because both rely on a common physical force, central to al-Fārābī’s and Ibn Sīnā’s music theory: motion. Examining key passages from these texts alongside other central Latin sources, I demonstrate that the concept of musical motion provided a common music-theoretical paradigm among Christian, Islamic, and Jewish authors of the greater Mediterranean region. Taking motion seriously, I contend, is the first step to recovering a shared Mediterranean music-theoretical space. Ibn Yaʿīsh’s commentary thus enriches Western music history by disrupting myths of its exclusively Christian and Latin origins.